Reports Of Death And Mayhem Greatly Exaggerated

Click on the title for the complete story published today, in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

After five days managing near-riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.

"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.

The real total was six, Beron said.

Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it.Both sources said no one had been killed inside.

To their credit, they are reporting the errors made in the original reports, made immediately after the storm. But the real question is, how did the information get so skewed in the first place?

I have the answer.

Rumors are a staple among the ignorant masses. One thing gets told and the next person tells the same thing, only with a little more embellishment than the first. Do that enough, and eventually the whole thing gets so distorted and skewed that it does not even bear the slightest resemblance to what was said, in the first place.

The ignorant masses seem to be content with getting their information this way. Rarely will they reserve judgement until they can verify something and if they do, rarely will they rush to verify anything. But, they will be the first to get on the phone and spread the rumor, without checking its validity, first. Thus, continuing the cycle.

These are the very same people that believe the lies and distortions of the left, without question.

Organizations like MoveOn.Org prey on these people, because they are such easy targets for their misinformation. They use the "so-called" expert statements of brilliant scholars like Michael Moore and feed them to unsuspecting sheep that will eat anything, put in front of them.

Louis Farrakhan (I call him by his earlier entertainment name, Calypso Louie) is another such rumormonger that plays on the ignorance of his audience. His statement that he received from a reliable (wink,wink,nudge,nudge) source that a crater was seen at the base of a levee, where a breach occurred, was no doubt received with little skepticism from a sizeable portion of people.

There are many more examples that I could cite. But suffice it to say that it is no wonder why these people are so ignorant, when they have the MSM exacerbating these rumors, half-truths, and outright lies through their openly biased reporting. You get what you ask for. Garbage in, garbage out.